That night, Xiao Ruyun slept very poorly. At first, she dreamed of a gray-white table covered with blood--her own blood--the blood shed during the "Military Liberation" ceremony. , this is a bit strange, because those people did not use any table, they directly moved the knife, or maybe it was just the blindness caused by her fear. After all, since their words mentioned using a bucket to contain the intestines, then It was only natural that there would be a stand to hold her blood out of her sight. She was so scared at that time that she didn't notice that there was a stand at that time? Those people with no faces but only voices gathered around the stage, raised their heads to her, and said: "The time has come."
Of course, this was her own choice and her agreement with them. She wanted to argue that it was not yet time. At least, she would try to get some clarification from them about the doubts she saw when she saw Bu Tiange, but she What she said were sporadic, hoarse words that even she herself couldn't understand.
She was too scared.
The men continued to chant: "The time has come."
Then she found herself flying above the thin clouds, which was usually a very pleasant experience. The breeze blew on her face, and a few birds flew around her from time to time. In the distance, through the gaps in the clouds, she could see the green mountains and countryside below, but Not this time. She saw that the clouds below were an ominous gray-white color. Rather than looking like clouds, they looked more like smoke from burning something. But it was the ignorant ordinary people in Shuanghe Town who invited them from God knows where to offer sacrifices. The smoke caused by the evil spirits who came here would not be so thick and sticky after burning anything. She looked into the distance again. There were usually beautiful clouds in the distance, such as pavilions and orange cats. However, this time the clouds in the distance also showed a strange appearance. There was an indescribable malice, and they seemed to know that she was looking at them, so they condensed the shapes of several knives - the knives that dismembered her alive. She suddenly looked up, and then she noticed that the sun above her head was dim and dim, and even those weird, almost malicious clouds were hiding far away. She looked at the lonely, dim sun in the sky, Suddenly I understood that it was the body of the sun, or the dying sun, or the sun wandering on the boundary between life and death.
There were no birds around, not even one.
The world is dying, and she is the only, unconscious mourner.
"!" Xiao Ruyun wanted to know where this sentence came from. She was sure that this sentence did not come from her trembling lips, and it was not heard by her sensitive ears. So, this sentence Where did the words reach her heart? She looked around, and there was no one else around, not even...
A monotonous song came from the bottom of the cloud, and Xiao Ruyun changed direction and flew towards the depths of the cloud below.
She didn't want to go through the ominous clouds. The swell in those clouds was definitely not the breeze. There could be some kind of spirit lurking in it, a mirage? This word put her in a trance. What important thing was related to this kind of beads? She shook her head. Although the mirage bead could fabricate all kinds of illusions, it was just an illusion after all, and it was not really that powerful. She held a magic formula in her hand and carefully flew close to the clouds, trying to find out where the owner of the mirage bead was hiding. Here, the water tribe's most feared thunder method, which is also the Xiao family's best, forced it to appear and break the cloud formation that made her secretly afraid.
Those clouds stacked up like a fortress. She watched carefully, trying to find the way out from the high wall. She learned the formations well, but the water tribe who used mirage beads may not have learned the formations, so she couldn't learn the formations as usual. Looking at the formation, those may have been randomly piled up by the owner of the mirage beads according to the shape of the underwater reef, and even the shape of the door may not be the one that humans are used to. For example - found it! She couldn't believe her luck, so she looked around again before diving in. The sun was getting dimmer, but everything else was the same as before, and then she dived in carefully.
It was a twisting and narrow small gap in the clouds. Xiao Ruyun had to work hard to avoid those sticky gray clouds, as well as the tentacles that stretched out from the clouds from time to time to grab at this narrow gap. , while she tried her best to dodge, she tried her best to ignore the shriveled monk corpses hanging on the tentacles. The time it took for a stick of incense to fly felt longer than a lifetime to her.
Under the clouds was a vast expanse of wasteland. Looking around, there was no trace of green, but rugged rocks. Dead diseased trees and scattered skeletons could be seen everywhere. Xiao Ruyun originally thought that the Shuanghe area was already considered the best in the world. It is a desolate and depressing border. Who knew that compared with this place, it could be a prosperous paradise? What kind of place is this place? Let alone villages and cities, even the vegetation is lifeless?
wrong! In this case, where did the singing she heard earlier come from? Has she not escaped from the illusion created by the mirage bead? Could it be that the singing just now was also an illusion created by mirage beads?
She calmed her mind and looked carefully towards the place where the previous singing came from. Finally, she saw a line of slowly moving figures in the bleak background. They were lined up in a loose row, along the bones of stones, the bones of vegetation, and the bones of humans and animals. The road pointed out by the skeletons was heading towards their ultimate destination. The father and son never looked at each other, and the mother and daughter never looked back. The people who fell along the way gradually turned into one of the skeletal signposts on this road, just like thousands of them before. as they generally do to those who receive orders. What they sang was not a song, but an order they had received. They sang the order they had received so as not to forget it. The content of the song was—
"Follow the blood of the headless bird, blind people, follow the light of the dying star, remember it never breathed, follow the bones of the monks, how can they die if they have not lived?"
The queue gradually walked into a small stone house in the wilderness. It was a shack built haphazardly with crude stones. Maybe the stove built with a few random stones in the wild would be more refined and regular than it. If it were A quarter of an hour ago, Xiao Ruyun would have thought it was a cattle shed or a graveyard where the Yi people buried their ancestors. Now she knew that the stone house turned out to be a terrifying holy place! Those people abandoned their families and children, abandoned everything and came to this wilderness in order to leave what was left in it!
She looked into the stone house, which was too low for even a few servants to live in. People were entering one after another, and there was a long queue that could not get in or out.
She got closer and could see a little bit of what was going on inside the house. Sure enough, there was a hole in the house. In the hole were countless steps going deep... I wonder where these steps lead?
She moved closer to see more.
The pilgrims whose wives, parents, and children had fallen behind without looking back suddenly turned to her and sang: "The time has come."
Xiao Ruyun woke up late at night and finally understood what Hualin had told her a long time ago, which was what she saw with her strange eyes - the wilderness, the stone house, following the blood trail of the headless bird without looking back. ranks, and the world is in an abyss? No, the edge of death.
